Summer Reading

A round-up of books for summer reading

Reading list: 6 essential books on Scotland and the Scottish independence referendum

The Scottish independence referendum will take place on Thursday 18 September 2014. With the UK party leaders campaigning hard in Scotland this week for a “No” vote, we round up some essential reading on Scottish politics

Doe Dose

A plastic fawn, palm-sized, lives on my office desk. He gazes at my open office door. His right front hoof is raised, poised for haste. The deer of my Mississippi childhood were the Virginia whitetail, Odocoileus virginianus virginianus. As a child ten years or so, fresh from reading Felix Salten’s Bambi, I rested my forehead against backseat car windows and took in miles and miles of Mississippi forest. Commutes between school and our isolated house were long. I imagined myself a whitetailed doe, keeping up with the car through those woods, a blur of velvet hide and muscle. I now walk to campus in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The odocoileus virginianus virginianus, the Virginia whitetail, emerge from the battlefields, animal grace among memorials and hardwoods. My round-eyed dog and I greet all deer with silence when we exercise in the morning light. [excerpt

Reading Round-Up

Little bits and pieces from around the web… 1. In case you missed it, David Brooks wrote a column about China in The New York Times last week. In it, he details two perspectives on China’s future presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. On the one hand, The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica… During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last. The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States… Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships. On the other hand, James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little

Reading Round-Up

Little bits and pieces from around the web… 1. In case you missed it, David Brooks wrote a column about China in The New York Times last week. In it, he details two perspectives on China’s future presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. On the one hand, The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica… During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last. The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States… Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships. On the other hand, James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little

Reading Round-Up

To start, a few pieces not related to the events in Xinjiang: 1. “Edge of the American West,” a history/philosophy academic group blog, ran a piece today by David Silbey titled, “Death Preparatory to Resurrection [Boxers, July 13-16, 1900]” that reflects on Western media coverage during that time of the supposed massacre of foreigners in Beijing (later proven to be false): This was the week that the westerners besieged in the embassies in Beijing died. They would be reborn again quite quickly, but for several days in the middle of July the world was firmly convinced that they had all been slaughtered. According to the New York Times of July 13th, working off a report by the Daily Mail of London, the Chinese Army had mounted a final assault on the legations in Beijing on July 6th, backed by heavy artillery… Also in the historical news this week: “Nixon Announces Visit to Communist China”—that’d be July 15, 1971 (ht Ray Kwong via Aimee Barnes). (Last year, we reviewed Margaret MacMillan’s recent book, Nixon and Mao, which details the visit the following year, and the negotiations that led up to it.) 2. Also from Aimee Barnes, her blog features a fascinating interview with Joel B. Eisen, a professor from Richmond School of Law who was a Fulbright lecturer in China in 2008-09: Preparing for classes in China was much more difficult than at home…They knew little about our legal system, so I was often starting from scratch there. In Energy Law I spent several weeks explaining the basics of American law, and administrative law in particular. Learning how administrative agencies work can be frustrating and difficult for American law students, let alone those with a rudimentary knowledge of our legal system, so that was a challenge. In International Environmental Law, I spent much time discussing bedrock principles of international law before moving on to talk about global warming

Reading Round-Up

To start, a few pieces not related to the events in Xinjiang: 1. “Edge of the American West,” a history/philosophy academic group blog, ran a piece today by David Silbey titled, “Death Preparatory to Resurrection [Boxers, July 13-16, 1900]” that reflects on Western media coverage during that time of the supposed massacre of foreigners in Beijing (later proven to be false): This was the week that the westerners besieged in the embassies in Beijing died. They would be reborn again quite quickly, but for several days in the middle of July the world was firmly convinced that they had all been slaughtered. According to the New York Times of July 13th, working off a report by the Daily Mail of London, the Chinese Army had mounted a final assault on the legations in Beijing on July 6th, backed by heavy artillery… Also in the historical news this week: “Nixon Announces Visit to Communist China”—that’d be July 15, 1971 (ht Ray Kwong via Aimee Barnes). (Last year, we reviewed Margaret MacMillan’s recent book, Nixon and Mao, which details the visit the following year, and the negotiations that led up to it.) 2. Also from Aimee Barnes, her blog features a fascinating interview with Joel B. Eisen, a professor from Richmond School of Law who was a Fulbright lecturer in China in 2008-09: Preparing for classes in China was much more difficult than at home…They knew little about our legal system, so I was often starting from scratch there. In Energy Law I spent several weeks explaining the basics of American law, and administrative law in particular. Learning how administrative agencies work can be frustrating and difficult for American law students, let alone those with a rudimentary knowledge of our legal system, so that was a challenge. In International Environmental Law, I spent much time discussing bedrock principles of international law before moving on to talk about global warming

Library Search UX report summer 2016

During Summer 2016, Imperial College London's Library Information Systems team ran a round of user experience research into the information-seeking behaviour of undergraduate and postgraduate students with a specific focus on the use of the library catalogue and discovery interface. The purpose of the work was to understand user behaviours and preferences to target development of practical improvements to the Library Search interface

Reading Round-Up, December 17

It seems there’s been an outpouring of writing about China lately—so much that we actually haven’t been able to keep up with it all (especially since for the China Beat editors, December brings with it the madness and mayhem that mark the end of an academic term). So, before we settle in for the holiday break, we thought we’d bring you a pair of reading round-ups that point to all the pieces we wish we’d been able to write during the past few weeks. We’ll post part I (focusing on Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace prize win) today and part II early next week, then take a break until after the new year. • At his Forbes blog, Gady Epstein looks at “Life After the Nobel,” concluding with this thought-provoking observation: Liu Xiaobo will not be forgotten, in no small measure because China’s leaders will keep pressuring the world and their own citizens to forget him. • Perry Link attended the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10 and discusses the event at the New York Review of Books. It was also announced earlier this month that Harvard University Press will be publishing an anthology of Liu’s writings in 2012, and that Professor Link will be supervising the translation team for the project. • Jeff Wasserstrom shares his thoughts on Liu and the peace prize, pointing to a few historical analogies to keep in mind, at Dissent magazine’s website. At The Economist’s website, James Miles also takes a look back in time: Chinese leaders probably failed to anticipate the battering that China’s image abroad would suffer as a result of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. They would have expected that their boycott of the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10th would invite comparisons in the West between China and the Soviet Union, which responded with similar fury to the award of the prize to Andrei Sakharov in 1975. It is unlikely they fully realised that their behaviour would be equated even more prominently with that of Nazi Germany

A review of first grade vocabulary using silent reading, quick response exercises

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit